Slashdot videos: Now with more Slashdot!

View

Discuss

Share

We've improved Slashdot's video section; now you can view our video interviews, product close-ups and site visits with all the usual Slashdot options to comment, share, etc. No more walled garden! It's a work in progress -- we hope you'll check it out (Learn more about the recent updates).

jamie found a long and painstaking piece up at The Economist asking and provisionally answering the question: "Does the spirit of scientific scepticism really require that I remain forever open-minded to denialist humbug until it's shown to be wrong?" The author, who is not named, spent several hours picking apart the arguments of one Willis Eschenbach, AGW denialist, who on Dec. 8 published what he called the "smoking gun" — it was supposed to prove that the adjustments climate scientists make to historical temperature records are arbitrary to the point of intentional manipulation. The conclusion: "[H]ere's my solution to this problem: this is why we have peer review. Average guys with websites can do a lot of amazing things. One thing they cannot do is reveal statistical manipulation in climate-change studies that require a PhD in a related field to understand. So for the time being, my response to any and all further 'smoking gun' claims begins with: show me the peer-reviewed journal article demonstrating the error here. Otherwise, you're a crank and this is not a story. And then I'll probably go ahead and try to investigate the claim and write a blog post about it, because that's my job. Oh, and by the way: October was the hottest month on record in Darwin, Australia."

The article is penned by authors of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine [wikipedia.org], an "institute" with just 6 faculty members, among which two sons of institute head Arthur Robinson [wikipedia.org], Noah and Zachary. A 50% incidence of nepotism? How can this be considered a serious research institution?

To further discredit the paper's first author, who is also the head of the OISM, I will mention he has signed the Discovery Institute's Dissent from Darwin [dissentfromdarwin.org] petition.

Now, in addition to the shaky credibility of the authors, you say this paper has not passed peer review. I'll stick with the judgement of serious scientists, thank you very much.

That's Dr. Arthur B. Robinson, Dr. Noah E. Robinson, and Dr. Willie Soon to you. The first two are chemists and the last a physicist, all have PhDs and have published in a range of peer reviewed journals. You will need to come up with a better rationale than that.

While labeled flamebait, this is something of a problem, even in less politicized fields of science. Most scientists are earnest truth-seekers, but a minority are not, and the peer-review system is not always robust to them. I work in an area of computer science that will never make Fox News, but even in this area things are sometimes suppressed for what's hard to describe as other than political reasons. At the very least, politically unpopular positions get all sorts of extra hoops to jump through that others don't--- e.g. if you're casting doubt on a position the journal editor or one of his friends staked his career on, better expect some random made-up requirements [scienceblogs.com]. If your paper scoops a large and well-funded group's work, there's a chance it'll be rejected by one of their friends, so they get to publication first--- and their publication might coincidentally borrow a few ideas or theorems from your rejected paper.

It's not all bad, and in fact most is probably good. But there are some very rotten parts of the scientific-publishing apparatus. It doesn't help that most journals are run by for-profit companies that are a bit shady themselves (Kluwer, Springer, etc.) who have no real interest in the quality of the science they publish or how to improve it. And it doubly doesn't help that the academic rat-race has gotten increasingly cut-throat, so people feel they need to resort to dirty tricks to get/keep a job, get tenure, get grants, etc.

Hokay. As someone who works in science publishing for a medium-sized (neither one of the top, nor one of the inconsequential) publishing houses:

i) If you're casting doubt on our editorial board's position then you will indeed be expected to have more solid evidence than some random, 'out there' paper that blew in, unsolicited. That's just the way of the world. Got the evidence? All is well, it's probably an awesome scoop!

ii) If you scoop an important and well-funded group's work, *awesome*! Get over here, we'll get you peer-reviewed thoroughly and double-quick, pulling in favours if necessary - that scoop will be great for our impact factor!

iii) Kluwer are goddamn shady, make no mistake, but I work for a company which is both for-profit and for-science. There's no conflict, because so far we haven't been offered any money _not_ to publish the best science we can. Hell, it'd be *great* if someone would, but from experience I'd have to conclude that there _is_ no group with bottomless pockets waiting to bribe us into submission...

They weren't preventing dissenting opinions from being accepting into peer reviewed journals - they expressed disappointment in the fact that the peer review process wasn't doing its job: weeding out bad science.

The main paper in question was a literature review paper (funded by the Marshall Institute [wikipedia.org] and the American Petroleum Institute [wikipedia.org]) full of bad science, where the actual authors of the papers cited claim to have been profoundly misintepreted, and in which severe methodological flaws have since been found. One of the authors doesn't even believe that CFCs affect the ozone layer. It should have stood as a textbook example of why we have the peer review process to begin with - it's not a platform for anyone to publish scientific nonsense.

Scientists actually are pretty skeptical people by nature, those who seem to be saying "I'm a skeptic! I don't know the science, but I'm absolutely certain it's a liberal hoax and we're all being lied to"... not so much. Most "skeptics" are nothing more than contrarians; skepticism to me implies a willingness to investigate the issue for one's self, but most of the denial movement shows such a poor grasp of the science that they clearly haven't done so.

They weren't preventing dissenting opinions from being accepting into peer reviewed journals - they expressed disappointment in the fact that the peer review process wasn't doing its job: weeding out bad science.

This September, Mr. Mann told a New York Times reporter in one of the leaked emails that: "Those such as [Stephen] McIntyre who operate almost entirely outside of this system are not to be trusted." Mr. McIntyre is a retired Canadian businessman who checks the findings of climate scientists and often publishes the mistakes he finds on his Web site, Climateaudit.org [climateaudit.org]. He holds the rare distinction of having forced Mr. Mann to publish a correction to one of his more famous papers.

As anonymous reviewers of choice for certain journals, Mr. Mann & Co. had considerable power to enforce the consensus, but it was not absolute, as they discovered in 2003. Mr. Mann noted in a March 2003 email, after the journal "Climate Research" published a paper not to Mr. Mann's liking, that "This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the 'peer-reviewed literature'. Obviously, they found a solution to that--take over a journal!"

Mr. Mann went on to suggest that the journal itself be blackballed: "Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board." In other words, keep dissent out of the respected journals. When that fails, redefine what constitutes a respected journal to exclude any that publish inconvenient views.

Scientists actually are pretty skeptical people by nature,...... Most "skeptics" are nothing more than contrarians; skepticism to me implies a willingness to investigate the issue for one's self, but most of the denial movement shows such a poor grasp of the science that they clearly haven't done so.

When it comes to climate, there seems to be two groups - skeptics, and believers. It is amazingly difficult to get believers to reevaluate new data (and perhaps endanger millions in grants?).

Personal anecdote:Last spring when I was shopping around for a new source of funding, after having my funding slashed to zero 15 days after going public with a finding about natural climate variations, I kept running into funding application instructions of the following variety:

More to the point, peer review is NOT theory validation -- it is supposed to be a final edit by an impartial party to find errors of fact, reason, and presentation. It is never supposed to be the "Stamp of Approval" about the topic, it is only a filter to weed out papers not yet ready for publication.

Theory validation comes from those who read the papers and use the information to test, retest, or modify their own experiments to either confirm, deny, or suggest alternatives to the information presented.

Having something published in a journal is not the be-all, end-all, it does not mean that a theory is now correct one and for all time. It means it is time to start wider discussion and testing. The way science works is by trying to prove things wrong. You see phenomena in nature, and you come up with what you think is an explanation for them. You refine said explanation to the point that it makes testable predictions, the sort of thing like "If X occurs, Y will also occur," or whatever. You then set out to try and prove your theory wrong. You test those predictions. You say "Ok, well then let's try making X and see what happens, if we don't get Y, we know that we are wrong." Each time you fail to falsify your theory, you are more sure it is true.

Others join in, they re-try your experiments, make sure you didn't fuck up. They find alternate explanations and test those (well maybe Z could also cause Y, not just X). The more times that everyone tries and fails to falsify your theory, the more sure you are it is the right one. Only by repeated testing by yourself and others, only by actively trying to figure out what is wrong with your theory can you reach one that you are certain (or at least as certain as we can be) is right.

So publishing an article is NOT the last step in that, it is the first. You do some work, your write it up, you publish it. Some reviewers look at it to make sure there is nothing obviously wrong, and it then goes out to the larger community. That's when things start.

Thanks for the link. I know that on Slashdot you're not actually supposed to read the articles, but nonetheless, I found the Economist post and the author's response illuminating. The author raises good points about the dangers of over-reliance on the peer review system. It's a good system but it is not doesn't always work - crap gets through and good articles aren't published. Simply ignoring any non peer-reviewed work puts far too much faith into the system.

Why the hell did this guy get moderated down? He posted the author's response to the Economist article! It's directly relevant.

Isn't this precisely the risk of overreliance on the peer review system? Unpopular opinions get silenced. I would mod up the parent but can't as I have posted in the thread. So, I'm going to repost the link:

Isn't this precisely the risk of overreliance on the peer review system? Unpopular opinions get silenced.

That's a common myth. You see, there are many journals. All want to grow their subscribership, increase their impact factor (the scientific journal measurement of notoriety.) They do that by publishing the most interesting research they can.

Doing research that mirrors what's already been done isn't very popular; grad students and postdocs, for example, have to clear what they're doing with their PIs. That's not likely to happen unless they've got some angle. This isn't apparent to the layman- or even someone who has "PhD" in their title, but even a minor difference in premise can be a big deal.

Identical research also doesn't get published. New, fresh, interesting research is what journals want. So while Willis thinks there's a massive groupthink, there's actually little of the kind. It may LOOK like groupthink, because on the surface, yes, there's the gross layer of widely-accepted-fact. The devil is in the details, and that's where research is taking place.

It's a special kind of arrogance to think that you can just stroll in and understand, much less analyze, a field where people dedicate years, if not decades, to their research.

The author raises good points about the dangers of over-reliance on the peer review system. It's a good system but it is not doesn't always work - crap gets through and good articles aren't published.

And neither of you understand the peer review system. It's actually a very complex system, and one full of competition on many levels.

First, there are many scientists trying to get their work published. Second, there are many journals. Third, each journal has a journal impact factor. Fourth, papers mention other papers. Fifth, journals and papers are not the only means for how scientists communicate their work or collaborate. There are conferences, groups invite speakers, etc.

A journal impact factor is a simple calculation. On average, a paper published in Nature gets X number of mentions in other journal's papers. A paper published just about anywhere else gets much less. So people want to get published in Nature, obviously. But people are also realistic, and their PIs help them with finding the right places to get published. And if you don't, you can try again. Sound research is likely to be resubmitted, often times elsewhere.

When a paper is submitted, you don't just get a "we're publishing it!" or a "DENIED!". You get questions from the reviewers, sometimes requests for more data. If it's rejected, often times it's rejected with some helpful, useful suggestions on how the reviewers feel the paper could be improved, and sometimes it's said between the lines that if you resubmit after taking some of those suggestions, you'll get the thumbs up from that reviewer.

Yes, Nature and the like are the holy grail. But many, many people don't look only in Nature. They read the journals dedicated to their little niche, because they know that sometimes good, fresh thinking doesn't make it into Nature just because so many people submit. And guess what? So are all their true colleagues. So while you don't get your name in the newspaper or a mention on the nightly news, your research still sees the light of day, and often times, with more 'useful' eyeballs. And if it's good, you impress people, they collaborate with you, present your paper at their group's internal meetings, or hell, just toss the paper across the lunchtable and say to their colleages, "you should give this a glance." It's extremely common for labs/groups to have two weekly presentations- one presentation is the work of someone inside the group, and often someone in the same group presents research OUTSIDE the group. And often, it's presented regardless of how sound it is; it's meaningful to say "here is what so-and-so found" and then show why they were wrong, or what they did badly.

Now, I'm on the outside of all of this as an IT person, but I've made many scientist-friends and their lives revolve around this stuff. "Willis" clearly doesn't understand it. The peer-reviewed journal system is complex, but also remarkably free of collusion. After all, if someone presents solid research that something widely believed to be true is not, it helps the journal because controversy sells copies, generates debate and discussion, generates mentions in other papers in other journals (hellooooo impact factor!), etc. The primary concern of a journal is not looking stupid by publishing something that isn't sound and well supported, not suppressing controversial research.

Show me a scientist who bitches and moans publicly about his anti-global-warming research not being published, and I'll show you someone whose science wasn't sound enough to cut the mustard. Every day thousands of papers are submitted to journals and rejected partially or fully, and it's not a conspiracy. It's people doing research that isn't supported enough. There is certainly a dark side, namely, reviewers who don't recuse themselves or aren't qualified to evaluate a particular paper, but that's one reason multiple reviewers are involved, and you can always submit your work to another journal.

For some reason I don't think going, "Lalalalalala, I can't hear you" instead of refuting the points they bring up is going to engender somebody to change their viewpoint, rather the opposite. If somebody is already believing there is a cover-up this is about the only thing you could do, besides admit it, that reinforces that idea.

Here's an idea: if you believe the GP and the majority of people who believe as he does are irrational, haul out your global climate data sets and indicate why they're irrational. It couldn't be worse and would probably be a lot better than the wretchedly stupid argument you just "formulated."

Because it's a waste of time, that's why. Offering evidence to a denialist ostrich

Not every climate skeptic is a denialist ostrich. Many of us can be converted with patience, lucidity and openness.

Frankly, not that I've noticed.

Here's a question: have you actually ever read the IPCC report on the physical basis for climate change? I don't mean, have you read the critiques of it written by other people who are telling you not to bother reading it. I don't even mean, have you read the summary for policy makers. I mean, have you actually read the report?

Not every climate skeptic is a denialist ostrich. Many of us can be converted with patience, lucidity and openness.

That's a fair enough argument. The question then becomes, what's the cost/benefit trade-off?

Take another example - 9/11 conspiracy theorists. Yes, some of them can be deprogrammed and brought back into mainstream society. I've done it a few times myself. But how much time and effort should we really be putting into this? Do we REALLY need multi-million-dollar studies which 90% of them will ignore anyway? How do we approach the problem? Even if we put all our time and energy into it, how do we know when we've reduced the movement down to just those who are unable to listen to reason? Do we continue the effort for the next thousand years, or is there a point at which we can say "enough is enough"?

Honestly, I was never 100% convinced that AGW is a problem that we should to be worrying about right now. Probably not even 80% convinced. What I do know that this "climategate" manufactroversy is complete fucking nonsense. If anything, it's put me further into the mainstream camp simply because it's exposed the sheer lunacy and ignorance of the other side. If you're at all swayed by the release of the CRU e-mails, you seriously need to re-examine how you discriminate between good and bad data.

I have. It's not very convincing. In fact, based on your dogmatic certainty, I suspect it is YOU who has not read the research carefully. [www.ipcc.ch]

When you get done, you will realize: everyone knows that CO2 makes the earth warmer because of the greenhouse effect. Not everyone acknowledges that there will be catastrophic effects if we don't limit CO2 output. In fact, depending on how we limit CO2 output, it is not even certain that the effects of the limitation won't be worse than doing nothing at all. Certainly t

Particularly when we can't promise that the nations that compete with us on the global stage (*cough* China *cough*) will do the same.

I work for a global mining giant, so I really can't be considered a tree hugger, but China is starting to kick our ass on green technology. Maybe it is inevitable, but I really believe that if we implement some of the policies sooner rather than later - and we know they're coming - that we will be at least as competitive if not the leader in these things. I really love this country (the US). Damn, the better it does the better me and my children do.!

I would love to see the US become a leader in green technology. I'm not convinced that the best way to accomplish that is to impose new taxes that dramatically raise the cost of living for American citizens while increasing the size and scope of government. I don't see how you build a green economy by gutting the current one and diverting much needed capital into Uncle Sam's coffers.

Right now a lot of the reason that we are so energy-inefficient is not because we aren't being taxed enough, but because things like building codes are heavily biased against energy efficient homebuilding. So most of the homes that are build are insanely inefficient. Office buildings tend to be more efficient, but still not at the level of efficiency that would be possible if the codes were biased in favor of efficiency, rather than against it. E.g., I'm building a house in Vermont. The guy at the local lumber company was *aghast* when I told him I wanted 14" thick walls and R40 insulation. Nobody does that! In *Vermont*! That's just lame - there's no excuse for building an energy-inefficient house. They're more comfortable, hugely cheaper to heat and cool, and don't cost much extra to build--yes, you spend more on insulation, but you can buy a cheaper heater or chiller.

Another problem is the tragedy of the commons: nobody's willing to conserve first. So everybody buys an SUV, because everybody else is buying an SUV, and so we all need SUVs to avoid being crushed by other SUVs, or whatever. To solve this sort of mexican standoff, government regulation is actually a really effective solution. CAFE standards work. Unfortunately the anti-regulation climate of the past 30 years has prevented them from doing much good as technology has advanced--ironically, CAFE standards could have prevented the extraordinarily painful market correction that came to a head in 2008 in the auto industry, but since the auto industry lobbied so hard against it for so long, they had to be bailed out.

So sure, maybe carbon taxes aren't the right idea. Maybe there are other things we should do first. But for some reason nobody seems to be doing them.

The theory with carbon taxes is to offset them against other taxes, so that they are revenue-neutral for people who are being reasonably conservative, revenue-positive for people who are being very conservative, and revenue-negative for people who are being outright wasteful. So if you modify your behavior, carbon taxes *should* save you money. But sure, for people who aren't willing to do that, they'll suck. And consequently, they'll probably never be enacted, because nobody likes to tighten their belts. And so later on we'll all get to tighten our belts a lot, suddenly, instead of a little, steadily.

Yes, but you're not trying to convert them, as you said it wont happen. What you're doing is trying to convince the people on the fence. They see, somebody laying out refuting the points of the AGW crowd, which then responds with basically "U STUPID", that isn't going to gain any more fans.

Denialist ostriches aren't disagreeing because they have a qualitative or quantitative argument to the contrary, because their objections are based on ideology, not science.

The hard part is differentiating between the ideologues and the merely vociferous. Refusing to consider anything that has not been peer-reviewed is an ideology all of its own. Ultimately it comes down to a judgment call for anyone who is less than a perfect expert in the field. Although I am a big fan of applying the little boy who cried wolf criteria - the more unsupported claims someone makes, the less weight their opinion should carry. Of course that requires investigating prior claims which is gener

From where I sit, it's the people putting arbitrary "corrections" into the programs to make them come out the way they want and refusing to accept any articles that don't toe the party line into their "peer reviewed journals" who look like religious zealots, and the soi-disant "deniers" are the ones who are trying to do things in a proper scientific manner. Remember, boys and girls, if the facts don't support your theory, a scientist changes the

...to link to Willis Eschenbach's response [wattsupwiththat.com] in the summary. It appears that The Economist didn't even bother to contact Eschenbach before publishing this article by an apparently unnamed author. That isn't exactly what I would consider high-quality journalism.

I beg all of you to please see this TED Talk [ted.com] before modding me down again. Ive been labelled heretic for posting on related stories in the last couple of weeks, actually modded insightful until the thought police arrived and modded me troll.

The weather exhibits chaotic behavior [wikipedia.org] and to find precisely one single cause for variation is futile, like CO2 emissions from human activities.

The hottest day on record! screams the summary. Er, well since 1941. Well and good, how do you know the hottest day last century in Australia didn't happen in 1940?

The Earth has been getting warmer [wikipedia.org] since about 10,000 years ago. Truth. AGW doesn't explain that. But it does follow that the Earth was getting warmer while we humans still lived in caves and were probably numbered in the thousands, not in millions of people. No, we are told. AGW is about the speeding up of warming. Really? We know for sure what the speed of variation would be without humans around? Let us not confuse premises with facts.

The variables are many and not one of them is well understood: ocean currents, atmospheric currents, solar radiation (insolation), the effect of the strength of the Van Allen belt, volcanic eruptions, etc. No weather model can correctly predict past, known, climate; how can one believe that the future predictions are correct?

We need a more open discussion and a lot less cries of burn the heretics. We are talking about science, not religion.

BTW, if anyone knows of a climate model that correctly predicts past, known weather, please post a link.

The article's point isn't to ignore all that. It's that to say that some random blogger likely doesn't have the tools to correctly analyze the data, and may well be doing their own shaping of the facts. And proving that to yourself is going to take a couple of hours (at least) of research and your time. The end result of which is probably going to be that the people who posted the data were aware of the factor in question, went and checked what the source was, and have a good explanation for what's going on with the data and why they did what they did.

All of which is public record, and has been analyzed six ways from tuesday, by people with far better credentials than you or the blogger is likely to have.

So, in this writer's opinion, it's not worth his time. If someone can get into the peer-reviewed journals, where the standards of competence and knowledge are much higher than on a random blog, he'll pay attention. Because every time he's gone and done the background check on some blogger's new climate data scandal, he's found it isn't a scandal at all, and quite often (like in this case) the blogger already knew that. But was posting it as a scandal anyway.

So it was a waste of time, both to read the blog and to take it seriously.

It's that to say that some random blogger likely doesn't have the tools to correctly analyze the data

On the contrary, if the raw data is available and the method used to massage it, then the tools are readily available. It's interesting to me that when Prof Mann produces a paper where he's fiddled with the data (as shown by Wegman, McIntyre/McIntrick and as verified by Dr North of the NAS in congressional testimony), the paper is not retracted, it's `defended' (mostly by use of blogs). The same is true of Briffa's Yamal chronology and Steigs choice selection of PC's in his Antarctic Warming paper. We aren't talking particle physics here; you don't need a billion dollar accelerator to reproduce this kind of analysis.

The moment you demand all skeptics believe "just because", it stops being science. global warming is a perfect example of something with questionable science reaching the point it's being treated as a religion, and anyone questioning it is a heretic.

we are in serious trouble if someone can't question manual manipulation of dataset's which are the basis of spending trillions of dollars of tax payers money on carbon trading. it's even more disturbing is the fact they get labels such as "denialist" - if you are incapable of leaving the emotional responses at the door, then you aren't fit to be argueing the science.

I believe that the climate science isn't the problem in terms of AGW; the problem is that the solutions to AGW are arguably economically questionable. Hence the issue has become intensely politicized. People who strongly oppose the proposed solutions to AGW are often the same ones who tend to argue aainst AW as a whole regardless of their actual knowlede of the topic. People need to be able to separate the two issues from one another, that is to say that the existence of AGW is a separate issue than any solutions to AGW. However, it will never ever happen. Both ends of the issues will not yield ground and everyone ends up losing something in the bickering.

You bring out examples of supposed flaws in global warming as a "gotcha" argument, but ignore the fact that each [realclimate.org] and [arizona.edu] every [scholarsandrogues.com] one [skepticalscience.com] of these arguments has been repeatedly debunked.

Again - you're ignoring rebuttals to denialist arguments, then pretending they don't exist. It's not that no-one's listening to your arguments, it's that they are scientific nonsense.

The moment you demand all skeptics believe "just because", it stops being science. global warming is a perfect example of something with questionable science reaching the point it's being treated as a religion, and anyone questioning it is a heretic.

If you *know* it's questionable, then send your explanation to a peer-reviewed journal for all of us to see.

You can't? pity, but chances are then you're no different from the thousands of other "armchair scientists" making outrageous claims with no actual backing, as the guy analyzed in TFA. And making actual scientists try and reason with all of you is an utter waste of their time, which we'd rather they spent doing their actual job.

hah i love the peer reviewed journal response. it's a perfect closed loop, you can make the challenge because you know no scientific journal is going to publish an anti AGW paper, and it lets you avoid answering any questions.

ask yourself what's so threatening about someone like me asking why CO2 lags temperature gain? after all i'm just an armchair scientist, your mighty peer reviewing brain should be able to crush my arguements with ease, right?

You don't have to provide an alternate explanation to falsify a theory, you simply have to show that it doesn't do a good job of explaining what is going on. The "You can't explain it!" crap is precisely what the religious nuts try to pull. They say "Science can't explain everything about this, thus you have to accept our explanation." No, sorry, not how it works. Just because there isn't a scientific explanation at this point doesn't mean you are right.

Well same deal here. You don't have to provide a perfect climate model to falsify an existing one, you only need to show how the existing one is wrong.

Science isn't about being fair, it isn't a case of "Well YOU explain it better than me, or accept I'm right." It is a processes for learning about the natural world, and for separating what works from what doesn't. Showing something doesn't work is an important part of science. Ideally you'd be able to present a theory that doesn't but that's not always the case.

Cold fusion was a good example. Group claimed to do cold fusion, other labs falsified their research, since their experiments were not repeatable. None of those labs provided a theory for working cold fusion, none had to. All they did was show that this particular theory was wrong.

My problem isn't so much what's in the peer reviewed journals (maybe there are problems with the data, if so I assume we will eventually see that), most of the stuff I've seen in peer reviewed journals seems ok.

It's the dramatic hysteria and propaganda that you hear outside of the peer reviewed journals that really gets to me. The idea that if we don't stop emitting CO2 the oceans will rise, flooding out ocean front cities. There is no peer reviewed article proving that, quite the opposite, actually.

When you read peer reviewed articles, scientists are careful to put in qualifications and caveats, as they should. What I object to is the propaganda that comes after that fact, ie: "CO2 is a positive radiative forcing component (verified fact)..........therefore if we keep adding CO2 to the atmosphere the results will be disastrous (wild conjecture)." Carefully watch what politicians say when they start talking. Very often they will start with something that is verified in a scientific way, then extrapolate in ways that no good scientist would dare to do. The fact is, global warming as presented in scientific journals is not nearly as disastrous as the event presented in the news.

In a way it reminds me of Y2K. At the time I would read articles in journals like Communications of the ACM, studying how much it would cost to fix various things, and estimating the number of computers that might have issues. Then I would look at the news and hear predictions of power plants exploding and airplanes crashing and wild unrest. At some point there was a disconnect between the science and the propaganda.

It's only anomalous if there's only one set of data points. YOu can take samples from all over the planet if you wish and compare the various samples which significantly reduces any local effects that skew the data. Isotope ratios can also be used to give an idea of the climate as well. Just because we haven't been keeping direct temperature records does not mean that the data set just stops.

Wrong. Occam's Razor says that, faced with alternate theories both explaining satisfactorily the same phenomena, you must assume as correct that which requires the least assumptions.

Here it's between "people who have studied for many years the field have determined such, and have decided not to answer critiques from anybody who can't demonstrate having studied the field similarly" and "people who have studied the field for many years have conspired to create a false impression upon everybody else, and silence any critic who dares break the illusion". The one that requires the least assumptions is, obviously, the former instead of the latter, therefore that's what you must assume as true until proven otherwise.

Most of the anti-AGW crowd is simply doing armchair, a-priori reasoning behind why AGW is false. "Humans are too puny to have an effect!" they say, or "The climate has changed drastically fast even without humanity being around!" Often there are political reasons for holding this position--certain arguments on how to deal with GW are certainly political in nature, and may come into conflict with one's own dogma, and thus psychologically one may be predisposed to oppose GW on that basis.

HOWEVER, that does not mean that some people that argue for AGW do not fit into the same shoes. Remember, just because you are "correct" does not mean your reasoning is. Naturally, someone that hates big business and "the man" may also psychologically have a reason to believe in AGW--another reason to rage on about the status quo.

If I was a betting man I'd bet for AGW, but really I know the science behind it is quite complicated and I know I'm nowhere near competent to make a good, solid argument on the matter, so I must approach the issue with a tempered agnosticism while leaning a bit towards the AGW side because that's the verdict by a vast majority of hard-working PhDs, and I highly doubt that climatologists consist of some dark, left-wing communist sect of economy-destroying conspirators. That is what true skepticism is, noncommitance (particularly emotionally) to a position particularly when you are not an expert on it. Many on both sides of the GW debate are not skeptics but reactionaries with their thought ruled by political underpinnings. Most of the people I know that rant about how AGW is a fraud no absolutely nothing about the mechanisms scientists go about acquiring the data on past climate conditions.

I've never understood why this is even an issue. Okay, from a purely scientific standpoint it would be interesting to know whether or not humans are having an effect on the climate. But as a practical matter I don't see why anyone has a problem with cleaning up our act. The basic goal is "Hey guys, maybe we'd all be better off if we found better ways of producing energy than by burning stuff and letting the smoke into the atmosphere."

The only arguments I've heard from the (usually conservative) anti-global-warming crowd are absurd. They fall into two main points as far as I can tell -- one is "It's anti-capitalist" and the other is "Government has no business telling private companies what to do."

In fact this is perfectly illustrated by the above post, who says

Naturally, someone that hates big business and "the man" may also psychologically have a reason to believe in AGW

How is that "natural"? How does that even remotely follow?

"It's anti-capitalist" is just ridiculous. As an example, say we want to reduce emissions and stop using coal, so let's use nuclear. Where do they think the nuclear plants are going to come from? Someone is going to have to build, staff, and maintain those, and sell the resulting energy at profit. There are thousands of potential jobs just from the construction alone.
Someone has to design, manufacture, install, and maintain the smokestack scrubbers. Someone has to design, manufacture, and upkeep new and more efficient engines. Or solar panels, or hydroelectric power stations, or whatever. All creating jobs, all being done at profit.
There's a whole green industry waiting in the wings to do these things. How on earth is it anti-capitalist, anti-business, or anti-"The Man" to see a need for better and more efficient service, and provide that need at profit?!

"Government has no business telling private companies what to do." I don't get this one either. Private industry would never regulate itself in consideration of anything but its bottom line. There's a reason we're not all still working 14 hour days and dealing with child labor -- and it's not because corporations voluntarily relaxed those standards. Why does anyone think it's a good idea for companies to crap all over everything, dump any pollutants they want anywhere they like? But the second someone suggests that maybe that's not good, out comes Fox News and their ilk to blame government for ruining everyone's fun.

Finally, I don't see how anyone can argue that we can continue to take billions of tons of carbon-based fuel, set it on fire, release whatever combustion byproducts into the atmosphere.. and absolutely nothing bad will happen. So, again, even if it's not having any actual effect on the global temperature, wouldn't we all be better off not breathing that crap?

It really does weaken the position of those who support the AGW theory. Why? Because it is name calling and over simplification. Pretending that everyone who doesn't agree with you is simply in denial of what is happening and then making up a cute little label is not the sort of thing that speaks to a rational debate. It is the kind of thing a con man would do, and thus makes people wonder, why would you use those tactics?

So as a start, you have to understand that there are some major differences in terms of what people believe who are skeptical of the AGW thing. These are just some examples:

1) There are people who believe the whole thing is a crock, there is no warming, it is all made up, etc, etc. These are the only people who could be called in denial, by any stretch of the imagination.

2) There are people who believe that there has been a warming trend recently, however the trend is entirely natural. It is right in line with the kind of trends seen historically, and thus there is no cause to believe this is anything but a natural occurrence. They are skeptical that humans are contributing in any significant fashion.

3) There are people who believe that there is warming, and indeed man is contributing to it, but that the result will not be problematic, and perhaps beneficial. They do not accept the conclusion that the warming will lead to catastrophe, even though they do accept that humans are at least partly causing it. They are skeptical that a warmer Earth will be bad for humans.

4) There are people who believe that people are causing the warming, and that it will lead to worse conditions, but that it would be even worse to attempt to stop it. They believe that the money spent on trying to stop such a thing could be better spent on other things to improve human life. The sort of thing that while warming might cause X additional deaths per year, spending money on that instead of other things would lead to 5X additional deaths per year. They are skeptical that the proposed solutions are the best.

5) There are people who believe that people are causing the arming and that it needs to be stopped, but that reducing output won't do that. We need a different solution like geoengineering or something. Reducing CO2 output wouldn't help, at least not enough to matter, so we've got to find another solution. They are skeptical that the proposed solutions would do anything.

6) There are people who believe that people are causing the warming, and that it will be bad, but there is fuck-all we can do about it. We are too far along, shit is going to happen anyhow, so we might as well apply our energies and money to surviving the change, not to trying to prevent it, since that it impossible. They are skeptical anything can be done at all, other than to try and survive the change.

So a big part of the problem with trying to frame everyone as a "denialist" is the simplification of the argument, to try and say "Oh they all just ignore everything that is said." No, in fact, many don't. They simply come to a different conclusion. Also they may well find enough evidence to sustain part of the argument, but not all of it. You find people who say "Sure, I'll buy the world is getting warmer. We've got pretty good instrumental data on that. However I'm not so sure about CO2 being the cause. The data on that is more shaky. Either way I'm really skeptical that a warmer Earth will be a bad thing, there's essentially no data to support that." They aren't just saying "La la la, I can't hear you!" They are just not convinced by all the arguments.

Well, when you simply dismiss them as a "denialist" and act as though they are a moron, that does nothing to convert them. In fact, it may do the opposite. They say "Hmmm, this is the kind of thing con men do. When someone questions them, they just attack and shout down their questioner. They are afraid of scrutiny. They want you to accept what they say, unquestioningly. Why are AGW proponents acting like this? Could they be con men?"

So seriously, knock it off with the label. You are doing nothing to help.

Average guys with websites can do a lot of amazing things. One thing they cannot do is reveal statistical manipulation in climate-change studies that require a PhD in a related field to understand.

Aye, there's the rub...

I think the author is overlooking two simple facts: not everyone with a website is an "average guy", and that there are more than a few people in the world who are capable of understanding advanced mathematics and statistical methods who don't have the related PhD that apparently enables one to do so.

There are tons of examples of peer review not working. Even ignoring papers that are outright fraud but still manage to get through, scientific journals are places for debate, they don't establish truth. Any particular paper (that is good) will be looking at certain evidence, and possibly be considering its implications, it doesn't establish the final word on the matter.

Now, you can choose to rely on the opinions of scientists to form your opinions, and often that is enough, but if you really want to be sure of any particular topic, you should investigate it yourself. It might take a lot of work, but you will be rewarded with knowledge.

That said, global warming isn't all that inaccessible. If you have a basic background in math and physics, you can get close to the cutting edge just by reading the IPCC report [www.ipcc.ch] since its such a great summary of the field. I guarantee you will quadruple your understanding of the topic just by reading that alone, and it will give you a good launching point to dig deeper, because everything it talks about is directly referenced to real peer reviewed papers.

Some interesting things I found reading the IPCC report:

It isn't entirely certain that the net effect of human pollution is warming, it could also be cooling (see chapter 2).

There is no reliable knowledge of how much CO2 has affected the current warming trend. The report says 'most of it' based on the logic that they can't think of another explanation.(see chapter 9)

The writers of the IPCC report aren't very confident of their main conclusion, which is that it is very likely that most of the recent warming is human caused. In the report, they are very careful to qualify that statement; although they are not so careful in press conferences (see the synthesis report).

Every self-respecting geek who is willing to opine on the subject of global warming should read that report. Otherwise they are leaving themselves uninformed.

The quotes cited below are taken from the "Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report" (dated Nov. 2007).Needless to say, it's unclear what report the original poster was quoting.

It isn't entirely certain that the net effect of human pollution is warming, it could also be cooling (see chapter 2).

"Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations. This is an advance since the TAR's conclusion that 'most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in GHG concentrations' (Fig- ure 2.5). {WGI 9.4, SPM}... It is likely that there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years averaged over each continent (except Antarctica) (Figure 2.5). {WGI 3.2, 9.4, SPM}" (p. 39; emphasis in original).

Nothing, ever, is entirely certain in science. Even "laws" are constantly tested and retested.

"Sea level rise under warming is inevitable. Thermal expansion would continue for many centuries after GHG concentrations have stabilised, for any of the stabilisation levels assessed, causing an eventual sea level rise much larger than projected for the 21st century (Table 5.1). If GHG and aerosol concentrations had been stabilised at year 2000 levels, thermal expansion alone would be expected to lead to further sea level rise of 0.3 to 0.8m. The eventual contributions from Greenland ice sheet loss could be several metres, and larger than from thermal expansion, should warming in excess of 1.9 to 4.6C above pre-industrial be sustained over many centuries" (p. 67).

There is no reliable knowledge of how much CO2 has affected the current warming trend. The report says 'most of it' based on the logic that they can't think of another explanation.(see chapter 9)

The writers of the IPCC report aren't very confident of their main conclusion, which is that it is very likely that most of the recent warming is human caused. In the report, they are very careful to qualify that statement; although they are not so careful in press conferences (see the synthesis report).

Yes, not very confident:

"Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level. {WGI 3.9, SPM}
Many natural systems, on all continents and in some oceans, are being affected by regional climate changes. Observed changes in many physical and biological systems are consistent with warming. As a result of the uptake of anthropogenic CO2 since 1750, the acidity of the surface ocean has increased. {WGI 5.4, WGII 1.3}
Global total annual anthropogenic GHG emissions, weighted by their 100-year GWPs, have grown by 70% between 1970 and 2004. As a result of anthropogenic emissions, atmospheric concentrations of N2O now far exceed pre-industrial values spanning many thousands of years, and those of CH4 and CO2 now far exceed the natural range over the last 650,000 years. {WGI SPM; WGIII 1.3}
Most of the global average warming over the past 50 years is very likely due to anthropogenic GHG increases and it is likely that there is a discernible human-induced warming averaged over each continent (except Antarctica). {WGI 9.4, SPM}
Anthropogenic warming over the last three decades has likely had a discernible influence at the global scale on observed changes in many physical and biological systems. {WG

The author is a skeptic only as long as their skepticism and logic leads to conclusions that match the authors personal beliefs. As soon as it doesn't, well lets put a damper on critical thinking. Mmkay?

That was once the rallying cry of the AGW "consensus" -- that skeptics didn't publish in peer reviewed journals. The skeptics, however, managed to do so. The response of the "consensus"? As seen in the leaked emails, they attempted to prevent the studies from being published and to boycott the journals which published them. So enough about the "peer review" stuff. Number one, it's been done. And number two, it's quite disingenuous to demand peer reviewed articles while working behind the scenes to prevent them from being published.

The rapid rise in greenhouse gases over the past century is unprecedented in at least 800,000 years, according to a study of the oldest Antarctic ice core which highlights the reality of climate change.

Air bubbles trapped in ice for hundreds of thousands of years have revealed that humans are changing the composition of the atmosphere in a manner that has no known natural parallel.Re

Before everyone starts putting down the author for being anonymous, please observe that this is The Economist. For those of you not familiar with that particular publication, one of its distinguishing traits is that it does not publish bylines. Ever. Editorials in The Economist are backed by the reputation of the editorial staff of The Economist, not of any individual writer.

one of its distinguishing traits is that it does not publish bylines. Ever.

A benefit of that policy is that it discourages showboating ala Geraldo. Within the biz, everybody knows who wrote what so the authors get their credit within their professional circles. But the general audience, for whom the articles are meant to be written, has no name to hang any hype on.

I don't think there's any danger of modern science being "reformed" the way you describe. We're in far more danger of the masses infusing science with baseless conjecture due to the overall poor level of scientific education, resulting in the tainting of our scientific institutions with populist hokus. Witness NASA having to put together a press release reassuring the public after the movie 2012.

The idiotic "everyone's entitled to their own opinion, and nobody's opinion is inherently better" idea is resulting in homeopathy being immune from criticism because their opinions are equal to the opinions of qualified doctors. Here we have climate change skeptics, on the payroll of big oil getting the same weight as scientists with real, irrefutable data, thanks to this misguided "we are all entitled to an opinion and the right to promote it".

This is one of the fundamental flaws in the concept of free speech for all; it does not account for relative differences in resources. One wealthy liar can out-campaign ten poor truthful scientists.

I'm not against free speech, nor do I think censorship is the answer. I don't have a clue what the answer is, nor can I even suggest a solution.

I only want people to recognize that "free speech" as an absolute principle, while being all nice and cuddly as a concept, has very grave problems.

Yet you have fallen prey to the same black and white thinking the GP was criticizing. Assuming all climate change skeptics are on the payroll of big oil is ludicrous, as is your suggestion that all scientists who are not skeptical have irrefutable data even when they refuse to disclose that data.

Having a PhD does qualify you to hold an opinion, but it doesn't magically make that opinion valid, just as not having a PhD does not disqualify you from having a valid opinion. The problems you see in free speech pale in comparison to the problems with censorship.

The answer is to engage in critical thinking no matter the source, and not to give too much weight to any authority or lack thereof.

You are missing the point; if everyone's idiotic claims have to be subject to point by point analysis, then intelligence can be overwhelmed by stupidity when it has superior numbers. At a certain point you've got to say "My time as a scientist is costly, and not worth spending on such an obvious cretin"

What they did was publish thousands of peer reviewed paper, huge reports endorsed by thousands of scientists from around the world, revealed all the raw data, much of the "adjusted data", and all the reasons why the data is adjusted. IF this isn't enough, nothing will be enough to satisfy these skeptics.

The question is largely irrelevant. The real problems with climate science are being highlighted by intelligent people, not by cretins.

I'll make the reasonable assumption that you are pretty intelligent, and evidently you are of skeptical disposition. Have you ever read any papers on climate science? How about earth science? If not, as would be the case for most intelligent non-climate-scientists (not just not just non-scientists), I can say without insulting your intelligence that you have no direct basis for determining what the general thrust of the literature is, much less what the camps are, who populates them and how strong the relative arguments are within those camps.

There are plenty of researchers out there, qualified, with careers, respected by their peers, who look at the IPCC stuff and say it is not working. These are researchers who know how to think about hard problems.

Unless you've read the literature, this statement, too is presumptive. What it really means is that one or more intermediaries has told you this, and you believe that intermediary more than you believe another intermediary who thinks that most climate scientists are in agreement. So in this case, this entire argument comes down to trust in intermediaries. You don't know who the camps are and who really subscribes to what camp.

I did a "terminal masters" in ocean physics, so I have some direct familiarity with the literature, though certainly not as deep as if I were practicing in this field. My experience is that the camps lean much more towards accepting general consensus about the nature of climate change (largely anthropogenic) and the magnitude of the expected effects than the perception you describe. From what I know directly and from the intermediaries I use when I don't know directly, just about everyone in the climate science community now believes that the arguments around concentrations of carbon and warming are solid. So when people say how much warming will happen in a hundred years, that considered very hard to dispute. Where people have more critiques is how we will get there, and the closer in you get the less agreement there is. However, it's also true that for most of the really wide open questions about climate change, people have been equally wrong guessing towards faster and slower warming. The rapid melting of the Greenland ice sheet is a great example of this - nobody from the global climate modelers (like a friend of mine who's doing his postdoc in this now) to the ice physicists understood until a few years back that when the ice sheets began to melt that the meltwater would lubricate the rock upon which the sheets are sitting and cause them to slide more quickly into the ocean. So there's an example where change was called slower. On the other hand, if I understand correctly, there has been a greater uptake of heat by the oceans that was initially expected, which will delay warming on a scale of years to decades, but could result in acceleration once the oceans warm up and provide less capacity to capture heat. So that's a delay in warming.

Just how many people do you know would go to a homeopath instead of a doctor? Sure there are some. But there are some green nuts too. Often they are one and the same. Funny that.

This statement is also full of presumption. Look at the sales of vitamins, herbal supplements and other non-FDA-approved quasi-drugs. Those sales speak to a large body of people who do feel comfortable taking remedies that are not scientifically tested. Again I challenge you to show me your basis for concluding that they're "green nuts" - sure sounds like your impression more than any data to me.

I don't think this a question of treating the public like imbeciles. There are a vast number of books out there for those that want to learn more about climate science. This is a question of trying to understand the state of a scientific disc

Yes, you are very lucky to have scientists to think for you. Thats our job. It takes time, dedication, and specific talent to become an expert in a field of science. Most people lack the talent and/or won't put in the time/dedication.

Society has outsourced its heavy-duty thinking to scientific specialists, and so shouldn't be complaining when those specialists consider each others (peer reviewed) conclusions to be inherently more valuable than the rants of some-twat-on-tinternet.

Sometimes we are not entitled to an opinion - to be taken seriously. If I walked into a heart surgery theatre (suitably sterile) and gave my opinion about the appropriate treatment, the surgeons there would be entitled to say "Throw the idiot out".

The problem is, most of us humans know we don't understand heart surgery. Many of us humans don't realise how ignorant we are about other subjects too.

The quote from the Declaration of Independence is "All men are created equal.". Let's go ahead and extend that to "all people". Fine.

The point of the statement was that there is in fact no "divine right of kings". I'm fairly sure you aren't arguing that there is.

However, the fallacy in your statement is that, after birth, all humans are interchangeable (actually that's an argument for equivalence, not equality, but that's a lesser standard). There are wide ranges of intelligence, strength, courage, stamina, dexterity...OK I'll quit listing role-playing statistics. I'm sure you get my point.

Any system that attempts to enforce the "equality" of people in general, such as socialism, is doomed to failure. The real world doesn't work that way. Those who excel, which generally benefits society, should be rewarded. Those who don't, not so much. That simple principle is responsible for the success of the United States, and is ignored at our peril. Yes, I strongly believe in American Exceptionalism, since it's an observed fact.

The way it works (in the US) is that Congress allocates funds for research in general. Agencies like the NSF (National Science Foundation), DARPA, etc actually administer the grants. They take applications and decide which are the best ideas that should be funded. The people running these agencies are academics, not politicos. For example, the National Science Board, which oversees the NSF, is listed here [nsf.gov]. While these groups control which projects get funded, they do not control the results of the research. If a funded project disproved existing theory, it is up to peer reviewed journals to publish or not.

A common criticism of the system is that it encourages a sort of orthodoxy in research. So if the NSF things "dark matter" is a great explanation, then projects which try to find alternative explanations may receive less funding because it is viewed as a waste. This is unfortunate, but there is not enough money to fund all the possible projects so some sort of prioritization must be made. It is much better to have experts do this, even though they have biases.

If the political parties really had that much control of research funding and the results of that research, you would expect that over the last several years you would see lots of peer reviewed research disproving human caused climate change. After all, Republicans were running congress and the White House for a long time.

Now, in the list, the majority of the people I see there are deans, college presidents, a few professors and some people that I have no idea why they would be there. Some of the people on the list don't even have Ph.D.'s.

Mr. Arthur K. Reilly, for example, works for Cisco and has an MS in... well, it doesn't say.

Dr. John T. Bruer got his PhD in Philosophy.

Dr. Dan E. Arvizu is Director and Chief Executive of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. Gee, I wonder where he comes down on AGW. Just think, if I, as a Dr. Venture style Super-Scientist could prove that AGW is a myth, this guy may be out of a job. I wonder how he would vote for my grant funding?

Dr. Steven C. Beering is a Dr... as in MD. His science degree was honorary. He is the president of Purdue.

Dr. Camilla P. Benbow's specialty is education.

Dr. Ray M. Bowen is the President of Texas A&M. He does have a PhD in in mechanical engineering, although his resume is mostly academia administration.

Now not all of these people are out of place. Kelvin K. Droegemeier is an excellent fit He has a PhD in a scientific field. He has worked in the real world and has actually done REAL stuff, not just research, not just academia. (And his name! He had me at Kelvin)...

Still, I don't trust many of these people to know beaker from microscope, much less decide where money is being spent. Besides, should this many people in academia be deciding where government grants go? Aren't they kinda voting for their own salaries?

What makes you think senator Inhofe and his pals at the Heartland Institute are not "AGW skeptics"? - Is it the fact they are sock puppets for the coal industry?

I'm a "skeptic". I don't work for the energy sector.

Here's why I'm a "skeptic": If these politicians truly believed in AGW, would they be flying private jets to Copenhagen and riding around in Limo's (1200 of them)? Would you be wasting energy running your coal powered computer to read this message? Would Al Gore live in a mansion that belches more CO2 in a month than my neighborhood does all year? Of course not. But they would do all these things if they were using it to gain power, all while telling me that I have to cut back, obey their rules, and give them more money!

Republicans always love to repeat like sheep that "government bad, companies not as bad and at least provide something of value".

There.. fixed that for you.

The major problem of your argument is that for the last 8 years the Bush government only wanted to hear that global warming did not take place, and the same government has shown no hesistance to lie and cheat to get it their way. So, not only can you not believe the global warmer deniers and other flat earthers from Exxon, but you cannot even believe the global warming deniers in the same periode with government grant (if you can find any of those?).

Which is now completely balanced by Obama administration who accepts human caused global warming as their undeniable truth and bludgeons anyone that thinks differently.

Seems like Obama is more like a mix of Bush and Carter than the lefties will admit.

You do realize that the American Petroleum Institute not only funds the AGW thinktanks, but Exxon-Mobil [guardian.co.uk] actually outright offered a prize for anyone who could get a paper published that defended their positions, right? If you want a specific example, Soon and Baluinas, 2003 [seattlepi.com]. Here's some of their background [huffingtonpost.com]. Half the board of Climate Research resigned in protest after Soon and Baliunas's publication, by the way. So when you see hacked emails showing scientists dissing people like them, or McIntyre, or any of that ilk, realize that the scientists *really do* think that these people are putting out garbage and have vested agendas. It's just that when speaking publicly, they usually have more tact.

You're right that non-PhDs can certainly do PhD-level work from time to time. But how do the rest of us know whether to trust the work without expert-level knowledge ourselves? Allowing us to know who to trust to make technical claims is part of the function of the academic degree as a social institution. Peer-review serves a similar purpose. So, yes, I think lay people generally should ignore the contributions of people without "credentials" until someone with credentials can give it their seal of approval (note that this does not mean I think that non-credentialed researchers should be ignored by the credentialed, only by laypeople), not because they are sure to be worthless, but because most of us just have no tools with which to evaluate the work other then just looking to the letters behind the author's name. Sad but true.

So, I agree with your criticism of his implied claim that non-credentialed scientists can never contribute to advanced fields. But I think the thrust of his article (and, even, of the quote you selected) is quite correct.

This is the situation we are in: we may or may not have a very serious problem. Most of the people who would have to do the work, and pay the price, of solving the problem do not have the time or the interest to study the matter deeply enough to know whether the situation is bad. So we have to choose who to trust. Do we trust the person who is telling us what we want to hear, or do we trust the peer-reviewed science?

We don't have the third choice that you propose, where we figure out whether the guy who wasn't peer-reviewed is telling us something we need to know, because we don't have the time or the interest to check his or her work. We can *hope* that if what he is saying is valid, and can be verified, that it will make it through the gauntlet of scientific skepticism. But until it does, we simply don't know whether or not to listen to it.

If we listen to everything that might be true, before it passes through this filter, then we *inevitably* are going to be guided by our own prejudices, because we simply have no other way to decide who to listen to.

So yeah, I'm very sympathetic to what you're saying here. I'm in the same boat you are. But I just can't buy your argument, because it leads nowhere. And if enough people buy your argument, and refuse to use the tools that they actually have to separate the wheat from the chaff, and if this really is the serious situation that we are being told it is, then we are going to be begging our children for forgiveness, because it is they, and not we, who will pay the price for our choice.

That is very well said. The bottom line is that if I became King of the World and had to make decisions affecting the environment, I really only have three choices:

1. Become an expert myself. This is totally impractical because it takes too long and I have a huge range of other responsibilities.

2. Listen to lots of random people and make decisions based on which things I hear sound right. The upside is that I will hear an extremely diverse set of opinions and that the best option will likely be submitted to me. The downside is that many of the opinions are baseless claims by crackpots or people with selfish interests.

3. Listen to the opinions of experts whose sole job is to study and test these issues. Baseless ideas will not pass this filter and so I will be presented with a narrower range of views, but the best options should still be present. The major issue here is making sure the experts are really experts and that they have no other axe to grind.

Of these options, it seems like 3 is the most reasonable option and that is what our current peer review process is. It is always reasonable to question the expertise of the experts, but that same questioning should be targetted at random bloggers, too.

I think there is actually a very easy way to solve this problem...show us the code. Give out ALL the raw data, every little scrap, along with the source code for the programs they are using to manipulate it.

I have to go with RMS and his traditional view on data, which is probably the one and only time I'll ever agree on ANYTHING with that guy, but in this case I see no other way. if you want to prove to me that AGW isn't a scam, and considering how much leaches like Goldman Sachs will make off of carbon credits it is hard not to be a little skeptical at this point, then share the code.

I may not be able to read this data myself, but there are a LOT of really smart guys out there that can, so share it. Hiding from FOI requests is NOT the way to get anyone but the most fervent Koolaid drinkers to go along with your beliefs. After all we have had the creationists trying to debunk evolution for quite awhile now, but most folks won't believe them because the data is there for all to see. Considering that the changes required by the AGW bunches will cost the working poor untold mountains of money, can cause another bubble and enrich parasites like GS, and can cause the loss of many more jobs and folks falling deeper into poverty, I think having transparency with regards to the data, both raw and adjusted, is not too much to ask, wouldn't you agree?

I think there is actually a very easy way to solve this problem...show us the code. Give out ALL the raw data, every little scrap, along with the source code for the programs they are using to manipulate it.

While that may sound great, it's not always possible, or even legal. There are WMO rules, for example, that prohibit the sharing of certain data. That's why, for example, there are some major hurricane models whose results are publicly available but whose data is not available. I think it's stupid, but it is the case.

Beyond such barriers, there's also the issue that many of the scientists who have been resisting FOI requests had initially been abiding by them. There seems to be a perception in the scientific community that certain people are filing FOI requests deliberately to waste their time in order to stifle research. Or worse. You need to keep in mind that most of the people filing the FOI requests are ideological foes of the scientists they're submitting requests for, since almost all climate scientists accept AGW. So, for example, one denier (a financial trader named Douglas Keenan who considers himself an amateur climate scientist) submitted a FOI request for the data on a paper authored by Phil Jones and Wei-Chyung Wang, which Jones complied with. Keenan "discovered fakery" in the paper and tried to get Wang arrested. The university invested and cleared Wang of any wrongdoing, but the damage was already done. Is it any surprise that Jones started trying to find excuses to duck FOI requests in the future?

Having looked at that paper and the text surrounding the formula, I wouldn't say that I understand it and I almost certainly have a better math background than the editors at The Economist. It isn't that the formula is incomprehensible; it isn't. The formula is pretty straightforward, but that doesn't mean it is easy to understand. There are not many people on the planet qualified to judge the suitability of the formula for calculating temperature trends. The Economist is making the claim that the climate-change sceptic Willis Eschenbach is not one of those people and that seems like a reasonable claim. Eschenbach is claiming, with no basis, that the formula is an arbitrary adjustment to force a desired trend. The Economist article is stating that until a peer-reviewed journal publishes a paper that backs Eschenbach's claim, it just isn't worth the time fighting over this.

Or, it is a convenient way to allow published material to stand or fall by its own merit and not be interpreted through the prism of its author. I believe it also has the practical advantage that there is no article "ownership" at the Economist, and hence there is no ego about getting contributions or suggestions for changes from other staff members. Lastly, it passes the experience test: I've been reading it for ~6 years now and the quality of writing and journalism is far in excess of any other mainstream publication. Oh, and their staff list is online. You can check out their credentials if you really feel the need.

"One thing they cannot do is reveal statistical manipulation in climate-change studies that require a PhD in a related field to understand."

Emphasis mine. I'm a math major, granted, but I can understand it just fine. It's just basic statistics. It's numbers, if you will. Being a meteorologist doesn't enter you into some magical realm where you have special magical numbers that behave completely differently than the number systems everyone else uses in mathematics. And certainly being a Ph.D. meteorologist doesn't require you even be a bachelor in Math, does it? So how would even having a doctorate degree in meteorology or any number of RELATED FIELDS result in one being capable of understanding statistics? Honestly, this absurd statement made by the author sums up what I felt reading the entire article. It's rife with the rantings of someone who doesn't really understand what's going on, clearly admits he doesn't understand the math, yet wants to chime in and put his $.02 in while discrediting someone else just as unaccredited as himself. This is sheer lunacy.

Any undergraduate student taking a statistics course can tell you when you're biased or hinted at what a dataset OUGHT to look like (expectations, or beliefs), the decisions you make on manipulations and adjustments to the graphs are almost dedicated to proving those correct, even if they're wrong. Just like when you sit down with a postulate you need to prove. You have the end result, and you are given some basic facts, now you're trying to force your way through definitions, techniques, tricks and the like to get the result that's on the paper. But when someone hands you an equally difficult proposition and says: "prove or disprove the following," the difficulty goes up tenfold if it in fact is not specifically chosen because it's easy to see that it's provable or easily disproved by counterexample. The same exists here. And I know that being a graduate math student I know that even I, my classmates, and even professors make more subtle mistakes than accidentally adjusting data in an incorrect fashion (even if your reason for doing so is 100% valid). I can assure anyone who's uneducated in mathematics that unless they are literally a doctorate in statistics, they can make those mistakes just as easily.

Here's my suggestion. Open the data. Don't funnel it to some government bureau or tightly controlled data collection agency, just PUBLISH IT and let everyone scoop up all the data for themselves. Then let people with math backgrounds or anyone really to sit down and mess with the data. Let everyone see it and if the entire community agrees that data from one node looks fishy or wrong, then we can discount it as a community, not as someone who believes "well damn, if just the data between dates A and B from this place would go away, the result would be clear... hmm.. well these do look off a bit.. maybe it's an outlier, i'll just delete this data here." Keep the thermometers used, keep notes about what's being done, publish that as well. If we believe there's an outlier, we should test the thermometers and if those are defunct, then we can throw out the data without bias. If a mistake like recording temperatures in kelvin is made, well we can adjust for this, but we don't need to discard it. Let's have some common sense people. It's PEER REVIEWED SCIENCE. Well, not technically. In peer reviewed science, we can do the SAME experiment over again and get the exact same result in a predictable fashion. In this, the data we get is from YOU, so of course it could be doctored to provide a guided result. It can ONLY be peer reviewed if absolutely ANYONE can take the RAW data and come to the same conclusions you did. This entire debate is just silly. I won't believe anyone is correct until this happens. How about we give transparency a try with this global warming crap for a change?

While I agree with you're basic premise of opening up the data, I think your view of the statistics is a bit limited. Anyone can draw a trend line and calculate error bars, but when multiple data sets have conflicting data, it requires to a great deal of understanding of experimental methods, theoretical models, etc. to determine which datasets are most relevant to make what kind of conclusions. The "tricks" come from matching up tree ring data, ice core data, satellite data, direct measurements and many others. Understanding the strengths and weaknesses these methods is where an expert is needed and why your undergraduate math major is less than useful.

Honestly, this absurd statement made by the author sums up what I felt reading the entire article. It's rife with the rantings of someone who doesn't really understand what's going on, clearly admits he doesn't understand the math, yet wants to chime in and put his $.02 in while discrediting someone else just as unaccredited as himself. This is sheer lunacy.

Actually, the editor of the blog [wattsupwiththat.com] carrying post that the article is commenting on has some background [wattsupwiththat.com] in the subject matter.

I’m a former television meteorologist who spent 25 years on the air and who also operates a weather technology and content business, as well as continues daily forecasting on radio, just for fun.

The weather graphics you see in the lower right corner of the blog are produced by my company, IntelliWeather. As you can see most of my work is in weather technology such as weather stations, weather data processing systems, and weather graphics creation and display. While I’m not a degreed climate scientist, I’ll point out that neither is Al Gore, and his specialty is presentation also. And that’s part of what this blog is about: presentation of weather and climate data in a form the public can understand and discuss.

This is what I've been telling people for years. I would also like to add that the smog in L.A. is also cyclical and natural, as well as the bad air in China. None of it is man made except for the lies that surround it. There's no way humans could pollute a planet let alone a city.

You can't mean all data behind the climate models, because some huge faction of it is still available. You must be referring to the small subset of it that was deleted before Climate Change became recognized as the important issue it is.

Heck, a lot of the Original Data behind such famous theories as gravity and a round earth was deleted, too. That has no bearing on the fact that those theories were proven true. Exact same thing with human-caused climate change.

The research unit has deleted less than 5 percent of its original station data from its database because the stations had several discontinuities or were affected by urbanization trends, Jones said.

"When you're looking at climate data, you don't want stations that are showing urban warming trends," Jones said, "so we've taken them out." Most of the stations for which data was removed are located in areas where there were already dense monitoring networks, he added. "We rarely removed a station in a data-sparse region of the world."

Refuting CEI's claims of data-destruction, Jones said, "We haven't destroyed anything. The data is still there -- you can still get these stations from the [NOAA] National Climatic Data Center."

In other words, the guys at CRU deleted the junk which they didn't think was worth keeping. But since their data came from external sources, all of the original data is STILL AVAILABLE. Of course, you won't hear about that at the usual denier blogs, since it's just so much easier to keep your flock bleeting in ignorance when you can say "OMFG, DEY DELETED DA DAT0RZ!!!!".

I hate to be a sourpuss, but it looks pretty bad when you begin your refutation of data manipulation by saying "less than 5 percent" is "NONE".

What I did by quoting that first bit is called "honesty". It's usually done by people who actually care about things like "honour", "truth", and "morality". Of course, the downside is that idiots who only care about sound-bites will focus exclusively on that single phrase, while ignoring the rest of the statement. That's the price we pay for maintaining our integrity.

Oh, and by the way: October was the hottest month on record in Darwin, Australia.

I am thoroughly convinced that no amount of evidence at this point can convince the skeptics. They are traveling on faith. This is why they are ridiculed. They don't like it, but hey, neither do people who believe that they've been abducted by UFOs.

I see your Darwin and raise you one Houston. Houston Texas had the earliest snow this year in recorded history. You would think that someone with a PHD, claiming to be qualified to write articles on climate change would know the difference between climate and weather.

Oh, but those weren't "debunked" so we're just going to conveniently ignore it. You cannot pick and choose what datasets you're going to side with. You have to either accept them all or debunk them all.

Regarding "sky rocketing" levels of CO2, quite the opposite. We're in a very CO2-starved environment compared to the majority of the time plants and animals have existed on the earth. We've had more than a magnitued higher CO2-levels in our atmosphere without oceans going acidic, the planet becomign like Venus etc.

Perhaps it's time to once again point out that "scientific proof" is a red herring. As any number of science's theoreticians have carefully explained over the years, scientific methods rarely if ever actually "prove" anything. Rather, science works mostly with a double-negative approach: An accepted theory is one that we have failed to disprove. Scientific testing and data collection is mostly aimed at showing that a hypothesis is wrong. Results that agree with a hypothesis are generally called "support", not "proof", because usually the tests can't provide proof. But a single (correctly done;-) test or observation is often sufficient to disprove a theory.

This is why scientific theories are often called "tentative". Scientists are always trying to think of new ways to test a theory, and sometimes they succeed in finding situations where a theory fails. The poster child for this was the failure of Newton's mechanics to explain a number of anomalous observations about a century ago, which led to Einstein's theories explaining how the universe actually works. Of course, his theories have never been "proved", either. They have merely withstood hundreds of new experimental tests. Tomorrow some physicist (or high-school student) may produce a new test that demos an exception to Einstein's equations. But until then, they are accepted not because we've proved them, but rather because we have repeatedly failed to disprove them.

Of course, fundamental physics is "easier" that climate in an obvious way. Weather is much more complex than things like particle physics or orbital mechanics, which can be reduced to some fairly simple equations (though not quite as simple as we thought back in Newton's day). Anything dealing with weather has to be treated statistically, since the complexity is far beyond the capacity of our most powerful super-computers. (Our computers can't even model a butterfly's wings in detail, much less the effect the butterfly has on weather halfway around the world.;-) Since the public is generally totally ignorant of statistics, it's not surprising that people would fail to understand what the AGW theorists are telling us. It's fairly obvious that even most of the posters here in this "nerd" community don't understand the difference between weather and climate. You don't have much of a chance of understanding the issue without a good grounding in statistical methods, in addition to all the kinds of chemistry that you have to understand.

But the constant use of forms of the words "prove" and "proof" in regard to scientific theories should be treated with humor, since such words are an open statement that the author doesn't know much at all about scientific methods. Those are media and propaganda terms; they have very little use in scientific discussions. Proofs are what mathematicians do. Scientists do disproofs. (And it is interesting how well the radically different approaches of math and science complement each other. So far I haven't read much enlightening from either camp on this topic, just the observation that they play well together. But we all know that.)

Except, the burden of proof is not on the skeptics. It is on those who wish to prove the exception to the rule is, indeed, the rule. If you want people to believe in global warming's existence, you've got to prove it, irrefutably.

Considering the history of climate prediction (lies, 180 degree inaccuracy, etc.), anyone trying to do that has a hard job ahead of them. We've been hearing "we're 10 years from total annihilation due to our abuse of the planet" since my parents were in grade school, and I've got kids of grade school age now, myself. Climatic temperatures were supposed to be 20 degrees hotter now than they are and agriculture will shortly become unsustainable for the population's feeding, according to what I remember being 'taught' when I was in grade school.

That's a lot to fight against. Generations of people are tired of the propagandized rhetoric and general bullshit.

If you want people to believe you - intelligent, discerning, capable people - the first thing you have to do is not treat them like idiots. That's something the climate change community (if there is one) needs to get right. The second thing they should concentrate on is not appealing to emotion (alarmist dramatization and unqualified exaggeration) but to intellect. (Look how far it's gotten the theory of evolution.)

Another big issue which is getting in the way of people "believing" in climate change/global warming/global cooling/global atmospheric sequestering/whatever is that they're concerned about the political and economic implications of anything pushed down from governments, on account of the climate change fear mongering. Anyone who (here in the US) has had to deal extensively with the EPA knows what I'm talking about. The government doesn't tend to fix the problem at hand, they just make business-as-usual more expensive. Trade embargoes on Chinese tires? Great, tires just got more expensive. Tax fuel so people drive less? Great, you just made maintaining one's lifestyle more expensive. (And, in many, many cases, just ruined the livelihood of many others - never mind lifestyle.)

What I am personally concerned about is the reactionary uh anacrophytes - people who seem terrified of old things. They're trying to push new, (scientifically) untried, short-term, ecologically destructive, and largely infeasible technologies such as ethanol, battery-powered automobiles, wind turbines, et cetera. Yes, there is value in expanding these technologies, increasing their efficiency, and so on. But these anachrophytes are vicious in their pursuits, and want regulations, new laws, and the like which will drastically and destructively change the economic landscape. These are the kinds of people who blather on about the "smog" that diesel engines put out, how they maintain our energy dependence - why they aren't a viable alternative to gas - yet they push things like lithium based batteries as "green". Which planet are they on?

And now we've got this environmental summit which, optimistically, will push forth changes that will cut down on emissions/etc. Realistically, it will be another splint on the otherwise healthy leg of the US and Western countries, allowing for China and the rest of Greater India, and the third world to push closer to us - economically and militarily.

In the best of times, such "optimistic" regulations are mildly disruptive and inconvenient to a society - at best. But these aren't the best of times; these are pretty tough times for everyone, globally. So even in a best-case scenario, we're looking at what might be generally termed, a bad idea. Struggling economies aren't terribly good at ecological preservation: they'll burn waste oil for heat, dump shit in streams, and so on. Damaging an economy for the pursuit of reducing CO2 output is ass-backwards if one has any perspective on how economies work.

So yeah, prove me wrong. The ball is in your court, but you're a long way behind in the game due to decades of slacking/misbehavior.

Ah yes, it doesn't take long for someone to post a link to the fully qualified blogger Anthony Watts whenever the word skeptic appers in conjunction with climate, but if you call yourself a skeptic then consider the following...

Well before Watt's stared his website scientists had already explained how adjustments are made to
compensate for the urban heat island effect [noaa.gov]
but that didn't stop our pluckly little weatherman from building a website to show those ivory tower dwellers where they were sorely mistaken. As Watts fame (and income) grew, NOAA thought it might be a good idea to try and add some clarity so they took 70 weather stations that Watt's himself had rated as the best. They re-ran their analysis with just those stations and compared the result to the original analyisis using all 1200+ stations. Lo and behold the two curves were virtually identical as can be seen on the first graph in NOAA's response to Watts [noaa.gov]. Why? - Because the trend does not rely on the abolute temprature, it relies on the changes in temprature. Such systematic errors in measurement have long been known and handled by mathematicians and scientists alike.

Observant readers may note that a fully qualified political scientist by the name of McIntyre did manage to get a paper on the subject published in an obscure journal which was subsequently hyped so much that the US senate held an inqusition (err, inquiry) into Mann's 1997 hockey stick paper.

The inquisition called on the US National Acedemies of Science to proffer an opinion on McIntyre's claims. Their testimony [nationalacademies.org] came down heavily in favour of Mann's conclusions but also made some minor crticisims of his confidence levels. Mann being the leading scientists he is took those critcisims seriously and subsequently published an extended study in the journal Science, yes that's right, the world renowned journal published by the very same organisation who critcised his confidence levels.

McIntyre's paper failed to stand the test of time but rather than having another crack at science he went off to become yet another fully qualified blogger and created the popular front site "climate Audit", I say front site because both Watt's are McIntyre are stongly associated with the anti-science lobbyists at the CEI and the Heartland Institute (now there's a couple of targets for an email hack if I ever saw one).

McIntyre used his site to continue pushing the claim that Mann had hidden his data (where have we heard that before?). To put it politely, I am highly skeptical of that claim. If it was true then how did NAS come to it's conclusions in their testimony, and how is it that many others have also replicated Mann's work? Why is it that both Watts and McIntrye take selective quotes from the testimony to loudly declare that they "discredited Mann's hockey stick"? - You would think that if the testimony actually came to that conclusion then they would want you to read it. Yet nowhere on either site will you find an link to the testimony because...well...skeptical people might actually go and read it.

Considering the above farcical chain of events I don't blame Mann for expressing his desire to keep McIntyre's discredited paper out of the IPCC reports, I would have said the same thing. However this does not change the fact that the paper was subsequently included and discussed.

For those who don't like to read scientific papers and abhore pdf's there is an excellent summary on the youtube channel Climate crock of the week [youtube.com], unsurprisingly Watt's abused the DCMA in an attempt to have the video removed.

The skill of genuine skepticisim starts by learning to be skeptical of ones own ideas and beliefs. It's siad that a great scientist starts every day by

This planet, and the life upon it, survived it before... it will do so again... even if we somehow actually were the cause of it (which as I said, I doubt).

Umm, no one is arguing that. There is not one single AGW proponent out there that would claim that global warming is going to destroy all live as we know it.

What it *will* do is alter the earth's climate such that it deviates from that which humanity is adapted to. Rising ocean levels due to polar melting and simple heat expansion of ocean water will result in coastline destruction, displacing millions, if not billions, of people. Meanwhile, changing weather will mean movements in fertile regions, destroying valuable cropland. I could go on, but I'm hoping you're starting to see the point.

And if not, let me spell it out for you: Humanity is adapted to the climate as it exists today. Change that climate and, regardless of the nature of that change, the result will almost certainly be negative. So, will AGW destroy all life on the planet? No, of course not. That's absurd. But it could seriously fuck us up.